


Remember Me Always

by Camo5768



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Destruction Ending for ME3, Discussion of Morality, Discussion of ethics, Everyone lives except for Shepard, Gen, Mostly Dialogue, OOC characters, Post ME3, Rating May Change, Shep is dead, Stream of Consciousness, tag as we go
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-16
Updated: 2015-03-16
Packaged: 2018-03-17 22:58:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3546947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Camo5768/pseuds/Camo5768
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shepard may not be here any longer, but the Normandy's crew still know how to remember their Commander. At the very least, they can remember how to fix each other, even if they can't bring her back. </p><p>Post ME3.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remember Me Always

**Author's Note:**

> Im not usually one for Authors notes, but as this is the first work I've posted here, hello out there! I'll be trying to stick to a once per week update, but I've never been able to stick to it in the past, so we'll see...
> 
> This work literally came out of nowhere, and may or may not have an eventual plot that resembles more than a collection of interconnected one-shots.

 

 “This life, you know, isn’t all that hard when you stop thinking about it. Saren, remember that? Hell, I remember the academy, all the cadets, all the fresh blood in the parade square, on the first day. You saw so many of them go crazy. The boys in my squad, talking about how much they’d doubted their CO’s when they droned on about percentages and stats, all of them about us, and none of us caring about them.

“But it happened. The security raids on Omega. Sometimes it was the gas. It gave you power, but it was a drug. They wouldn’t come out from the cloud and you would lose them. Pure and simple. When the smoke cleared, you couldn’t tell who it was ‘till you found the tags. Mercs and Cadets alike, lying dead and cold on the ground, contorted and burnt to a state where you tried not to touch. The pile of bodies thick enough to cover the floor like a carpet. Maybe we hit them in the cross fire. None one could tell. You shot or you got shot. Survival at it’s finest” It’s a cold barking that laugh that is wretched out of him as he fights not to lose his sanity to the same sky that he watches every night.

Even now, he fingers the fine chain in his palm, the cold metal slipping, sliding, falling over his fingers into a pool of metal. It’s a sea he often loses himself in, when he thinks you can’t see. But you, you know him better than he thinks you do. You know what the tags are, even if you’ve never tried reading them just to make sure. The weight of them on his heart is enough.

“Does it ever change? From Omega, thru the Omega-4 Relay, all the way to the bloody end at the Citadel? All we did was survive. Not more than that, but I wish all the same that there would be no need for the kind of murder that our survival condoned.” You look up in wonder at him, the solid part of your life, revealed to be more than flawed, but your anchor all the same. It’s those flaws that make it easier to hold on.

“Murder is murder. Is it supposed to change?” He laughs at this. “When you make the business of death your life, you don’t find much to be serious. You joke about the kills you made, the ones that you let escape so that they may bring more with them when they return.”

“The mercs on Omega, most of them have regrets. But you’d never hear any of them. While I was in C-Sec, there were thieves trying to steal enough to feed families, criminals trying to save their planet. Then Saren, damn him to hell, came and not even the thieves or the criminals survived. Without them, neither did their families or worlds.

“But it’s not about what happened then, is it? It’s what I did, what I become.” He bites off the end of the sentence, this is the part of life that he wishes he didn’t have to play. No matter how much he righted, it was always still wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

“Arcangel. Everything that was the mission on Omega. Bringing the crew together only to be betrayed at the very end. Then picking off every single merc who came over that bridge where I knew I was doomed, taking clean shots, but shots nonetheless. More than enough to pile them up and touch the roof on that place. How many stories did I write an end to? It’s the questions. The faces of the mercs as they float, unsuspecting, in your crosshairs, unready and so unwilling to die. Those faces plague you, every night and every moment you have space to think. Purgatory is filled with ex-Marines like that. They surround themselves with _life_ and _movement_ and _sound_ so that they can drown out screams of the dying and dead and the silence their bullets created.

“When there were Collectors, you kill them or they’ll kill you. So I killed, easy, pure and simple. I’ve been engulfed in the business of death, and nothing else for years. A solider is just a dressed up name for a killer with an excuse for everything. The scars, they’re your story, never washed away. There’s skin regen tech for the Marines but it’s not the ones on your body that haunt and hurt the most. It’s the ones that are inside of you. They scar your heart, and when there’s enough scars, your heart is dead but still your body lives on.” Even here, he is surrounded by death, pale outlines and dark shadows of the Thanix cannons, silent and deadly behind him. His life, his death.

“Is that what took Shepard? The haunt... the regret?” Your solemn eyes track his measured movements thru the battery from atop one of the many crates – ammunition crates, of course- that are stacked within the room to his perch near the roof. You might be young, but you’ve seen far too much to be called a child any longer. You knows that he’s just afraid. Of speaking, of saying that he misses her too much to function unless he thinks he’s as close to her as he can get without being dead.

“Even as you say it, so I fear it. Death and warfare are intertwined, demanding something in turn, one with the other, never apart. Ruthless and relentless is the cycle, as close to brothers as one can imagine. It’s too easy now. You used to have to see their faces, full of rage and fear on your scope. The instant before you fired, it changed to shock and acceptance, then it was the end. And you were the one that ended it, you did it or you died in their place.

“It’s all machines now. The Marines and the Cadets, their hearts are hard and their minds have gone soft, been made blank. It’s too easy to be a killer, to just let the events turn out as they will, and not try for peace. When they stop thinking about the lives they’ve taken, they start craving for more. More warfare, more death, more blood on their hands, more of whatever will sustain you through the high of battle before you come and crash.

“I guess at one point, I was in that trap too. You can make a life out if it, as I did, collecting your due and living off of it until you need more. When that life ends, by choice or by force, all you have left is the blood and words of all those you killed. It’s over your hands, your heart and all around you, drowning you in the incarnadine sea.” His voice grows softer, then softer still, and you have to strain to hear it over the sounds of the ship as it travels on, on and on and on, towards yet more conflict, and ever more battles.

"I have so few regrets, and never were you one of them, even as that list grows longer and the people around me are lost.  I am little without you, a litany of names, dates, a monument to death, marked as a killer. I will be remembered as such, but I will remember that I am other things too, more than just a shell of a person, having done only one thing. I am proud of my past, even if I cannot say the same for each one of my actions. Keep true to your heart, and you shall never falter.” He presses his hand against the glass of the ceiling, fingers tracing a far too familiar pattern of Shepard’s name and rank in the Turian custom. “Of you, Shepard would be proud, to know that her legacy continues far beyond her death. I guess she watches now, as the spirits watch over us”

“Now, come, let us go occupy ourselves with less depressing tasks. Joker perhaps has softer words and better memories than I.” You slip out of the battery hand in hand, taking in the rest of the ship with bright eyes, solemn eyes that have seen the worst in the universe, ready to stand and save Garrus from the spirits that never leave. You have to be his protector now that no one else has his six.

After all, you must repay your debts.


End file.
